I think the Internet will, sometime in the near future, just get shut down. That's been what actually happens in countries that are undergoing civil unrest or war like Russia, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Tanzania, Israel, Myanmar, etc. And it's fairly likely civil unrest or perhaps even war may spread to an increasing fraction of the developed world too.
So my strategy here has been to start downloading anything that I think I might need from the Internet and keeping a local copy. It's free and abundant now. It could become inaccessible within a matter of minutes if the right powerful person says so. There may be a low probability of that happening, but given the potential disruptions to our life of our always-on connectivity going away, it's worth being prepared.
Keeping an offline copy of the Wikipedia is fine, but if "the Internet just get[s] shut down" I would think we'll all be more worried more about not being able to use our bank accounts, have medical providers see our records, etc.
We're back to whatever forms of trade you can source locally in that case, but that should not surprise anyone who observes regions that are actually in crisis, because that is how the economy functions in those regions. You do your best to do something nice for your neighbors and they do their best to do something nice for you, and anything that requires global trade or supply lines simply doesn't happen.
Having a copy of your own medical records could be critically important if suddenly your friend who is a doctor is now your doctor because there's nobody else.
Money tends to be worthless is such situations anyway - it's backed by the full faith and credit of a government that best case no longer cares about you and worst case no longer exists. So you aren't going to worry about your bank account, nobody will accept credit or debit anyway.
There is a whole lot of other data on the Internet that can be very, very useful in such situations. Even just having a few hundred hours of collected kids TV shows means you can sit them down in front of Bluey while the adults do stuff that is critical for survival. Knowing how to build a smelter and bellows out of clay that you can find locally means you can restart metal production in a matter of days rather than thousands of years. Knowing what the local plant species are and which are edible might keep you from starving. Knowing how to scavenge parts and wiring, as well as what their datasheets are and how you need to hook them up, means you can fix broken electronics and potentially create new ones, which gives you continuing access to knowledge.
There might be a locked-down subset of the internet available, like we saw with AOL. Maybe there's a subnet for medical, a subnet for banking, etc.
The Internet is transforming from an open global network into 4 things:
- a substrate for business VPN tunnels (like the leased lines of old),
- regulated, approved, monitored e-commerce walled gardens,
- regulated, approved, monitored streaming walled gardens (like the cable TV of old),
- regulated, approved, monitored social media walled-gardens including chat focused ones like Discord and video focused ones like YouTube (replacing most for-print media, forums, and websites)
Great idea. Any pointers for someone who might do the same? I.e. data sources you deemed useful besides Wikipedia
shutdown -- never. just limited to the $COUNTRY_NAME social network and $COUNTRY_NAME messenger